As I write this, I'm heading home from London. I left early, partly because workers at the Innovation Unit were told that more rioters were expected in nearby Hoxton, so we should leave while we still could. As my train heads North, Twitter alerts me to outbreaks on looting in the Midlands and Manchester.

These are incomprehensible days for most law-abiding English people. We always think of ourselves as tolerant, fair-minded and, aside from the occasional football-related hooliganism outbreak, peaceable.

I'm leaving for California on Saturday. Some of my American friends can't believe what they're seeing on their TVs. Southern California has had its own share of riots, but they've quite often been political in their origins. What appears to be happening here can't be excused on those grounds . These are young people, many still at school, who are putting their future lives at risk (because we have more cameras on our streets than any other country, and mass arrests and punitive justice will surely follow) and putting at risk the lives, and livelihoods, of many more people in their own communities, for the sake of a few pairs of sneakers or a mobile phone.

Watching it play out on rolling news, the state of shock that many of us felt last night, was the result of a dread realisation that we cannot rely upon the police alone to maintain law and order. Although we take it for granted, a social compact exists in any country which can be broken at any time: if sufficient numbers of people attack the enforcement agencies (be they police or the military) they simply will be overrun, and all of us are then at the mercy of the mob. We're normally thrilled when we see this happen in totalitarian regimes – 'rioters' become freedom fighters, and we all rejoice. But, when the goal of the rioters is, not freedom, but apparently 'mindless' violence (though I dispute there's such a thing), we are shocked to the core.

Because we have to face the unpalatable truth: that, despite our belief in ourselves as a civilised society, we're never more than a few steps away from Lord of The Flies.

Almost no-one saw this coming, but it will be contained, and calm will return. Then the soul-searching will begin. I seek to make no excuses for what is happening, but, as Gus John, of the Institute of Education observed, we often talk about these young people, but we rarely talk to them. 1 in 5 of young people who have left education are currently without a job; we frequently demonise anything remotely resembling a 'gang' of them, and yet, up until now, we've been seemingly unconcerned that they have become completely disengaged from civic society.

David Cameron's vision of a 'Big Society' went up in smoke this week, alongside scores of buildings and homes, so we'll need another big 'post riot' idea. I would like to nominate one: a national education debate on what we want our young people to learn in school. Because the disengagement for many of these young people begins in school, when their interest in learning is sacrificed in pursuit of high-stakes testing and the attendant 'drilling-and-killing', worksheets instead of work experience, doing learning to them, not with them; when the very notion of a 'values-driven curriculum' is seen as dangerous left-wing nonsense, and the dominance of academic knowledge has driven out any respect for schools whose kids wanted to learn real-life, practical skills.

There are cities in Brazil where portions of entire local authority budgets are given over to young people to decide how it should be spent, in order to benefit everyone in the community. In England, we don't give our young people any sort of civic responsibilities – we simply don't trust them. When I work with schools who give students a voice, and give them rights and responsibilities, I see caring relationships develop, an absence of bullying, collaboration, not competition, and maturity beyond their years.

Perhaps if we abandoned our current ridiculous ambition for schooling – to jump us a few places up the PISA league tables - and sought instead for it to mould a compassionate, humane, civilised, participative citizenry, we'd perhaps consign the distressing scenes on TV, to history.

And, please, no more 'reverse elitism' nonsense from our politicians. Anyone who thinks that, by arguing against the hegemony of academic knowledge acquisition, we're depriving lower-income kids of the escape route to Oxbridge, needs to get out on the streets of our major cities and talk to them. Forcing these kids to learn a modern foreign language, or recite Shakespeare, or Milton, simply because a few academics think it's important is naïve, patronising and perpetuating the status quo of the disenfranchised learner. Meeting these kids where they're at (and that's currently in a literally terrifying place) demands that we ask them what they want to learn, what skills will give them hope for the future, and how to re-connect them with their communities.